Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: University

  • Stealing the T

    The Georgia Institute of Technology has a tradition of stealing the letter T. I first ran across this in a local news media story where the letter T was stolen from signage. The main tradition is stealing the T from Tech Tower which has “TECH” on each of the four sides. (They return it during…

  • Global Higher Education Trends

    According to Trends in Global Higher Education (PDF), we should pay attention to globalization, massification, Globalization is an interesting trend. As a college student, I enjoyed hanging out with international students and as an employer of student workers, half were international students. Exposure to different cultures, meaning values and perspectives and rituals and (the best) food was…

  • Impressive Information Load

    Last week I finished the Power Searching With Google MOOC. A month ago a coworker pointed out Google now offers the software used by this MOOC. As a Desire2Learn database and application administrator, I was curious. So I signed up. And actually finished! On my emotional high, I signed up for Current/Future State of Education shortly before…

  • Universities and SIS “Innovation”

    Several years ago, while I worked at a medium-sized university, there was a very similar incident like what happened in Student Is Sanctioned for Creating Class-Registration Web Site. A student wanted into a full class. So he built an application to routinely check for whether a seat was available in the Student Information System. The database…

  • Should CS Be Required?

    Each of the nearly 2,000 freshmen entering Georgia Institute of Technology each year must take a computer science course regardless of their major, says Charles Isbell, associate dean for academic affairs at the school’s College of Computing… Similar to traditional general education requirements such as philosophy or world history, the purpose of each courses is to turn out…

  • Georgians Lottery Suckers

    A CNN article on the $640 million lottery jackpot tonight revealed something interesting. According to data crunched by Bloomberg, Georgia residents are the biggest “suckers.” They spend an average of $471 per year on the lottery, or 1% of their average income, while receiving a payout of 63 cents on the dollar. Yeah, but I got some…

  • Curiosity

    In Curiosity Is Critical to Academic Performance, curiosity was measured as a strong factor like conscientiousness and intelligence for academic success. Capacity and speed acquiring information, staying on task, and motivation to work with information are all good things. At the end of article, I found this interesting. Employers may also want to take note: a…

  • College ROI

    I found this PayScale College Return On Investment (ROI) calculation in Businessweek interesting. (Bold areas added by me.) The PayScale calculation differs in two other respects as well. Like many ROI models, to calculate the cost of a college degree it includes all college expenses—tuition and fees, room and board, books and supplies. But instead…

  • Research in Higher Ed

    SC lawmakers want to professors at universities to teach more instead of doing research. An Associated Press article “SC budget would make professors teach more classes”: College professors should be in the classroom teaching at least nine credit hours each semester because the state is having a tough time paying for college budgets, said state Rep.…